I wish someone like me would not forget flocks of young chrysantemums, and the grumpy barn at sunset. They jumbled up the dream of a few days ago, and blazenly so. I also remember that the two kittens were more enthusiastic about the bucket of milk, which was, incidentally, green, but not the green I have come to think about with tenderness.
- Could not be more perfect… - she chuckled into my ear, and then bent slightly down to brush a stranded tickle. The movement was so fleeting that I felt vibration in one of my nostrils - as if someone had lip up a match, and the smell was trying to get out. She had not dyed her hair, and that was the only difference. Even her posture held. She missed my lips by a few lengths of a hairpin.
- You look normal.
- I don't look anything. But I do many things I do not do today. Is it called 'today', even? But rather, a shred of time, which is very-very yours.
- Mine?..
- It appears to me it exists on your orders. I should have been able to keep, oh, hilarious, only the awful gray and the boring white in that, which is my own. But don't trick yourself into believing that this is my reason for accepting this ability of yours… Oh, to say this is the same as letting it slip that I simply could not let go of your face.
- You are saying… You could have stopped this?
-… But instead, out of my stupudity, I dare to hope that you cannot let go of mine either. I wish this was true.

She demanded something I did not want to apprehend of the people, who sat on the floor near her yellowish feet, faces earth-toned and downcast. There was the amount of rumbling in the hall, and a strong smell of pine nuts. A small boy near the armoire played with the toy animal, which reminded me of a stag, but looked more grumpy, apart from having only one strandled horn. He would never look at the quarter from the same angle, more especially as he was to be taller than I had been at that age. He was yet to add the nuts to his breakfast sometimes. He was the only one whose head twitched at the sound of her voice, which, I thought, gnawed deliberately on the silence in the chamber.

- Don't go…
- Say that again.

I missed, trying to catch her soft upper arm, which was not muscular. She threw the chains aside and streaked through the steel door, past the garden tools that lined the porch, not pausing to clean the usual scraps of cat hair. Much as I wanted to help her, I did not pause either. At the moment, I had to retain her. My intestines were sizzling with the desire to retain her.

I knew they had not heard. They did not listen to their stomachs. The interlude, which was in their minds and also the love of their lives, was too interfering. Apparently, they did not resolve to kill. Or, if they did, that was in a most boring manner possible. This is why the victims could not return to them safely. They were left to the gray, and the white of the mould. But I could be trusted. This is why her road led farther right than I had ever lain in the grass.

She made one more joke to my strained croak, and told me not to let go of my killing instincts. In my mind's eye, strangers settled down with what they have heard often, they were coming to terms with swift romances, with dirty university toilets, with classics and goth music.

- Just keep your outdated updated, - her face looked serious under her fingers, although the phrase was intended funny. - Bring paperback show programmes as a deposit, sometimes. Just an example! Just an example! But you can, though.
- So that no one will be able to see?
- I'm sure you should.
I had a stray tear break away from its asylum. Or was the tear trying to find the real asylum somewhere else, within the usual trousers, which were never jeans, or the half-cured wound from a loaf pan?

- Are you coming? - she looked amused at my hesitancy.
- May I? Will it be necessary?
- Oh yes. And this, I am afraid, is the only time I can forbid you to.

What else was left, was the feeling of her heavy cheek on my shoulder, and her heavy hand on my knee. When I looked her in the face, I was safe, I had always been. There would sprout its youth the new wild cress for me to lie down. I believed it violently.